Outgoing signature links

What are your feelings regarding outgoing links within ones signature from an SEO perspective? Keep them follow, or switch to nofollow?

Personally, I'd like to keep them as follow unless there is a very compelling reason not to. I suspect most links will be to related sites when my forum grows, and the others that are not related, oh well, as long as the person is contributing. SPAM would be removed obviously.

Why do you allow follow or use nofollow (or block all together)?

Thank you.

 

I don't change them to "nofollow" because I think it's unnecessary manipulation. I try to leave things as natural as possible, and let the search engines go with the flow.

 

I agree with you Nick, and I think its the best thing overall for a forum. In your case, being an admin forum, you deal with a much higher percentage of members that have sites. I would think it would be a distinct disadvantage to disallow links.

In my case, I will likely get less members with their own sites, and might get more sign-ups for nothing more than a link. But, like you said, keeping it natural is good.

 

No, a lot of people use forums to promote their sites, and in exchange they make posts on your forums. When you start to take away reasons for people to post on your site, a lot may go other places.

Its a two way street in my opinion and adding nofollow doesn't really solve the problem anyway.

 

Ok, so I'm definitely sold on allowing follow links. It sounds like it comes down to just keeping the gate guarded for obvious spam like pharmaceuticals and such. Sweet, now I just need to figure out how to get the crazy traffic. LOL.

 

You could install a mod which will limit user permissions based on post count so they would need to have at least posted X number of times to add a link in their signature. I believe Cyb has a hack just for this on vb.org